Wrapping Up May 2018

It’s the last day of May! I’m mixing up my monthly wrap-up for something different.

Earlier in the month, I participated in an old 6 Degrees of Separation meme because I was annoyed with myself for missing the month everyone connected Memoirs of a Geisha to six other books. So, I did it anyway, and it was fun to make those connections again.

Right now, I’m listening to Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, and I’m loving it. I’m also loving Bahni Turpin’s reading of it. I’m reading it on a PlayAway system, and I’ve realized that, once again, I hate that it’s so hard to update Goodreads with my progress. I have very little clue how far I am into the book on this system because it is split into unequal parts or tracks, and Goodreads has no option for really marking that.

Fanfiction Reading Challenge

I haven’t exactly read a lot of published books this month, but I have been obsessively reading fanfiction. I don’t know why. If you want to see the breakdown of all 216 chapters, I listed the fanfics I binged on Monday, and all but one were in the Harry Potter universe.

Speaking of the Harry Potter universe, I stole Lord Voldemort’s identity and posted my plans for killing Harry Potter. If you have thoughts about how you could successfully kill or defeat the Boy Who Lived, feel free to comment.

Paradise Lost by John Milton and Pablo Auladell

I finally got around to posting my review of this heavy graphic novel. As a reminder, I count it toward the Graphic Novel Reading Challenge and the Library Love Challenge.

Orange: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1 by Ichigo Takano

I gave this graphic novel 5 stars. This counts for the Graphic Novel Reading Challenge, the Library Love Challenge, the YA/NA Reading Challenge, and the Platypire Diversity Challenge. I hope to watch the movie and binge watch the whole anime series some day.

Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough

I posted the review for Blood Water Paint a couple weeks ago, and I gave the book 4 out of 5 stars. It’s a historical fiction novel-in-verse about Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian painter known for Judith Slays Holofernes. This book focuses on her rape and the prosecution of her rapist. It counts as my 11th book toward the Library Love Challenge and my fifth book toward the YA/NA Reading Challenge.

Saints and Misfits by S.K. Ali

As an #OwnVoices novel, Saints and Misfits stars a Muslim high school girl who struggles with having a crush, escaping a monster, and disliking her brother’s fiancée. Once I get the review up, this will be my sixth book toward the Platypire Diversity Challenge for having characters of color and most of the characters belonging to a minority religion. By the way, S.K. Ali apparently started #MuslimShelfSpace on Twitter, and it’s supposed to be for books with Muslim characters written by Muslim authors.

I’m also counting this toward the Library Love Challenge and the YA/NA Reading Challenge. I’m up to the Dewey Decimal level on the former challenge now. This book and Blood Water Paint bring me up to 17 books out of my goal of 30 for the Goodreads Reading Challenge.

Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-Along

I caught up five more days on the Les Mis Readalong, which brought me to the end of the volume called “Fantine.” I could only think about Javert and Jean Valjean’s sword fight duet in the hospital in the latest movie. During #BookshelfBuzz, I had hoped to be further along, but I’ve at least started the second volume of Les Misérables.

On a side note, Twitter offered an article in my Newsfeed about teaching Les Mis in in prison. The noted reactions of this teacher’s students was very interesting, and it makes me want to get back into the Les Mis Read-along.

Interesting Finds

Krysta @ Pages Unbound explains why she won’t buy books on Amazon. One of these reasons is that Amazon is in regular pricing disputes with authors and publishers, which does what it can to pay authors and publishers les. She also gives solutions for fighting back against Amazon. The comments are also interesting to read, and one of them brought up potential issues over Amazon owning Book Depository.

Bee @ VIVATRAMP explains how to annotate books. She also gives reasons for and against annotating books. Where I was taught to use annotation to help analyze books, but that is impossible in some media.

Sarah Gailey analyzed Death Becomes Her (1992) for Tor.com in an essay titled, “Vanity, Patriarchy, and Futility: Death Becomes Her.” She carefully examines Ernest Menville’s character in light of vanity and his own self-importance.

Emmanuel Nataf from Electric Literature gives tips for writing a second person story. I know it’s possible to write great ones since one friend did very well with second person in a creative writing class. Have you read any second person stories that you thought were brilliant?

Jane @ Janepedia discusses blogging for yourself vs. blogging for an audience. I think this is an interesting post among the many that advise blogging for yourself only.

>^..^<

As of last night, I see that I have over 500 followers on WordPress and through email, and I’ve reached 300 on Twitter. Thank you all for your support through following, liking, reading and commenting on my posts. You’re wonderful!

How was May for you? What have you been reading?